[tlhIngan Hol] Is Star Trek: Discovery a new canon category?

De'vID de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com
Fri Aug 11 06:22:40 PDT 2017


On 11 August 2017 at 02:46, Alan Anderson <qunchuy at alcaco.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 2:17 PM, De'vID <de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Are people going to accept sentences from Star Trek: Discovery as
>> canonical Klingon? (For example, no objection if I use sentences from
>> the show as examples in {boQwI'}?)
>
> I object. Why would you pick those sentences as examples, and not, for
> instance, sentences from Qo'noS QonoS?

Simple: demographics.

It's said that there are 30ish fluent speakers, a small fraction of
which use {boQwI'}. Let's say it's 5, and that's probably an
overestimate. (By definition no fluent speaker needs an app to look
things up.)

Of people who have opted in to provide app usage statistics, there are
currently over 5000 30-day-active users (meaning people who have
actually used the app within the last 30 days), and over 64000 total
installs. Probably most of these people are casual fans, but at least
some are beginner or intermediate Klingon learners. But in any case,
there are three orders of magnitude more users of {boQwI'} than there
are Klingonists who use it.

Every time a movie comes out, people type the English subtitles into
{boQwI'} to find out what the Klingon was and how it breaks down.
Every time a book comes out with Klingon text, they type that into
{boQwI'} to find out what it means. If things are missing, people
email me to complain, which is how I know.

If I don't include the Klingon dialogue searchable by the translated
subtitles from DSC, I expect to get dozens of emails asking me why
those sentences are missing. If I do include them, I expect
approximately zero complaints from Klingonists. (The slight wrinkle is
that if I do include them, a "certain someone" will most certainly
post them to the mailing list to ask about their grammar, and name
{boQwI'} as the source, and *then* Klingonists will complain that I
included those sentences even though they're not canon.)

If thousands of people were reading {Qo'noS QonoS}, I'd consider
including sentences from it as examples, too.

> How would you answer if YOU were the one providing Klingon translations for
> the lines in Discovery scripts?

Fortunately, I'm not.

Perhaps I asked the wrong question. I don't necessarily consider
Klingon from DSC to be Okrandian canonical Klingon until Okrand
retroactively blesses it, but I'm going to (unless someone persuades
me otherwise) include them in {boQwI'} anyway before he does so. I
suppose the question really is, does anyone have a serious objection
to {boQwI'} containing both Okrandian canon and good Klingon which
conforms to Okrandian Klingon but which isn't from Okrand? Such
entries will of course be marked as having come from DSC.

-- 
De'vID



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